Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said his staff will gauge the “accuracy” of a major federal science report that blames human activity for climate change — just days after researchers voiced their fears to The New York Times that the Trump administration would alter or suppress its findings.

“Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,” Pruitt told a Texas radio show Thursday. “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”

Pruitt, who has expressed doubts about carbon dioxide’s role as a major driver of climate change, also dismissed the discussions in Washington about manmade carbon emissions, calling them “political.”

Scientists called his remarks troubling, especially because the report — part of a broader, congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review by a 14-person committee at the National Academies. The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies that humans are causing climate change by putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a clear increase in global temperatures.

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The report’s authors implemented the 132 pages of suggestions from the reviewers, and now the Trump administration has one last opportunity to review the document before publication. Agencies are supposed to sign off by Aug. 18 and send their comments to the authors.

“It’s a much more extensive process than a usual peer review, which does not typically come out as a paperback book,” said Bob Kopp, a lead report author and climate scientist at Rutgers University.

Kopp said he has “no idea” what to expect after hearing Pruitt’s comments. Staffers at EPA had already signed off on an earlier draft.

Eric Davidson, president of the American Geophysical Union, said the report has undergone “a very rigorous peer-review” and is “built on 50-some years of published research, and each of those papers went through its own peer review.”

He added that while fears of Pruitt suppressing the climate report might be more imagined than real right now, he didn’t rule it out.

“Certainly it’s a possibility, and if the administration doesn’t understand that it’s already peer-reviewed, that really is a sign of concern that he may not understand the process,” Davidson said. “If he’s continuing to question why CO2 is a big deal, that’s also very concerning, because CO2 is a big deal. … To see those quotes continue to come out is definitely disconcerting.”

Several climate experts said they welcomed scrutiny of the report, but they also expressed concerns that political biases could color the process.

“The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” said Kathy Jacobs, who oversaw the broader National Climate Assessment under the Obama administration and now heads the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona.

“The implication of [Pruitt’s statement] is that it hasn’t been linked to the data,” she said of the report. “That certainly is not true. This is built on a mountain of evidence.”

Even as Pruitt said EPA would review the report for objectivity, he criticized the Times for saying scientists worry that the administration might interfere with its publication.

“The New York Times out there saying they had to release this report because it’s going to be suppressed is just simply legendary,” he said. “It’s just made-up news trying to create a distraction from the real work that’s being done in Washington, D.C.”

His comments Thursday came the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a separate report confirming that 2016 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the records set in each of the two previous years.

This week’s dust-up over the 13-agency climate report is far from the first climate science dispute for Pruitt, who as Oklahoma’s attorney general sued to block a series of major EPA regulations. He drewcriticism after announcing in June that he wanted to conduct a “red team, blue team” debate of climate science, a move that his detractors said would put fringe views on the same plane as established, peer-reviewed research.

The EPA chief defended his “red team-blue team” strategy in the radio interview, saying that “this debate, this discussion, I think it’s good and healthy for the country.”

Pruitt told the Texas radio show that his agency would review the 13-agency report “like all other 12 agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and the methodology and accuracy of the report.”

So, my friend,which rock have you been hiding under?I the RINO’s did their job instead of”Obstructing”the President,”We the People”would be a lot further down the road than we are at present.I would suggest you talk to YOUR Congress Critter.

Ever wonder where the term “buffoon” came from? It was Count Buffon, whose opinions might have been dangerous in the time of the French Revolution had he not played the part of a …buffoon….to make them palatable. I look at Trump as playing the same game, only in a different way.

You got a job lot – a fool and the fool’s choices for cabinet.
“the report [ ] has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review by a 14-person committee at the National Academies. The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies that humans are causing climate change by putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a clear increase in global temperatures.”
But those weren’t proper peers says Pruitt – I’ll show you proper peers!
It will be very interesting to see who Pruitt chooses – if he names them at all.

Why are those skeptical about the alarmist claims of so-called climate scientists excluded from the peer review? Are you suggesting that anyone who holds a dissenting view cannot be considered qualified to be a peer?

The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies that humans are causing climate change by putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a clear increase in global temperatures.

Well just about everyone agrees GHGs have a warming effect, however “leading to a clear increase” is a far cry from the usual claims of CO2 being the “dominant” cause or anthropogenic causes causing the “majority” of warming since 1960 , without explaining the similar warming in the early 20th c.
What they are attempting to do here is back-peddle on ridiculous, exaggerated claims that have dominated climatology for the last 30y , while attempting to give the impression that they are not back-peddling and are saying the same thing as always.

That language is not vague at all – you’re displaying classic selective perception. The article said we are ‘causing’ a ‘clear increase in temperature’. That is very strong language.
Besides, we can’t be sure it’s not phrasing chosen by the reporter.

“This one simple thing” usually isn’t as effective as folks think it should be. Think about the consequences of prohibition and the war on drugs. They didn’t create Paradise on Earth and getting rid of them didn’t/won’t do that either.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Churchill link

We aren’t winning yet but perhaps we’re through losing. It’s certainly worth celebrating a bit before we get back to work.

Pleading that the research has been subjected to rigorous peer review doesn’t cut it.

… for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. link

Peer review in this case just ensures that the research doesn’t reach any inconvenient conclusions.
Science is a mess and the scientists know it. Claiming the kind of certainty needed for such a consequential effect on public policy is close to fraudulent.

Set up multiple peer review boards and see what they can produce
e.g. as a taxpayer I’d be interested to see what peers setup by Freeman Dyson (funded by US tp) could do in terms of scientific criticism and validation of every program and claim; and then find 1-2 other groups, selected to provide penetrating insights.
I’m tired of hearing CAGW government welfare science and apologists.

Its IPCCish. And has an amazing amount of bad or wrong or misstated information. The attribution section is awful and illogical. See my post Why Models Run Hot for the logical,disproof of its assertion. The executive summary ignores figures in the main text that directly refute executive summary statements. And so on.

“The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” said Kathy
Now Kathy, we know it was Already ‘reviewed by people who have a political agenda’, chasing after Fed Grant Money.

The ‘peer review’ concept is based on the assumption that the reviewers are knowledgeable.
The fact that they all subscribed to the false idea that CO2 increases cause massive temperature increases shows that they are ignorant of some very basic thermodynamic principles. In other words, they are not knowledgeable.
Mr Pruitt would be well advised to include a few hard-nosed physicists in his review team.

If you want hard nosed types, get engineers on board. Same basic math-physics-chemistry education but none of this peer review crap, all work is reviewed by Gaia and if the old bat doesn’t agree with your conclusions she kills everyone in the building-boat-bridge just to make her point.
‘Climate Science’ is more driven by a marketing mentality than a truly scientific one with a huge and hungry market in the msm for the next sexed up, salatious, pal reviewed, DOOM DOOM DOOM report.

+1
Get engineers on board that are used to working with gases and thermodynamics and enthalpy in gases. Have them fully validate and carry out an in depth ‘third party audit’ on the report. No academics, purely practicing engineers.

As I am one, I appreciate the confidence and sentiment – especially – wrt ‘practicing’. Just one word of caution though. I’ve known a few engineers who are quite political and some whose opinions are for sale (e.g. some shady expert witnesses). I would also be wary of engineering academics (“those who can do, those who can’t teach”). OK, that was more than one word. But in general I agree that practicing engineers are usually very adept at spotting BS and poor science.

But… a review by engineers would need measurements. Where are the measurements? How much more CO₂ cause how much atmospheric warming or cooling or, heaven forbid, yield the same temperature? About 4% of the added CO₂ is our contribution.

The ‘peer review’ concept is based on the assumption that the reviewers are knowledgeable.

They probably are knowledgeable. That just gives them more ammunition to back up their preconceived conclusions. The reason the general population has such contempt for experts is that those experts fail time after time after time. It’s the elephant in the room.

Unless we are prepared to pose some fundamental questions about how best to deliver the complex pattern of services on which modern society depends, we will I fear continue to underperform and disappoint as well as to be haunted by the problems of public contempt or perhaps even worse, disengagement and indifference. link

Until experts are held accountable for their failed predictions and bad advice, they deserve no respect, no matter how knowledgeable they are.

Also based on the premise they are unbiased but since they all get their funding from the government, there is a huge conflict of interest. Let’s get some science & engineering folks without a horse in the race to reviewing

“Until experts are held accountable for their failed predictions and bad advice, they deserve no respect, no matter how knowledgeable they are.”
Do you ever look in on what is actually happening in the Arctic? Just put that single word into search and follow your nose. No failure of prediction there mate – and I for one am grateful that the scientists are there to record and interpret the dramatic changes. If you don’t do that you’re missing out on a fascinating experience.

Again, “peer review” is held out as the gold standard of scientific truth. Unfortunately the Climate Zealots game that system to advance their political interests. Do you recall this “science”?
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” – Phil Jones

This illustrates the psychological damage that alarmism causes. Those who accept the IPCC as the arbiter of climate science are so full of fear that they fail to recognize a controversy even exists. Even more astounding is that this fear blinds them to the obvious bias that results in their fear in the first place.

I believe the IPCC pretty much has it right – if anything their most recent report is conservative and already behind developments. Having a scientific background, the principles of the IPCC analysis are, to me, clearly sound. No personal fear here though – the changes are not happening fast enough to be a danger in my lifetime, given my age and fortunate geographical location.
I do have a feeling of responsibility for the planet and its biota in the future, and I wonder if the guys in this forum ever reflect for a moment that they may be the ones who have the science arse about face – and if they ever reflect on the consequences of inaction if they are in fact wrong.
The mood worldwide is fast moving against the attitudes displayed in this forum, the effects of environmental disorder are beginning to impose themselves on populations. They will not remain quiet.

Jack,
You need to pay more careful attention to the facts, especially since you say you have a scientific background. You should do some due diligence on the claims of the IPCC, specifically the climate sensitivity, which is the root of the entire controversy. Examine the sensitivity in terms of forcing power in and surface power out, rather than forcing power in and temperature out and the deception will emerge from the fog.
While their claim of 0.8C per W/m^2 seems plausible, 4.3 W/m^2 of emissions per W/m^2 of forcing represents the same thing and is an obvious violation of COE considering that 3.3 W/m^2 of ‘feedback’ must arise from only 1 W/m^2 of forcing. If you can’t see how ridiculous this is, I’ll be forced to question your claim of a scientific background, since COE is one of the most basic tenets of first principles physics. Can you see how they perverted a linear metric of gain into a non linear metric of magic? The deception seems to have worked on you and many others.
You should also do some due diligence on ‘feedback’, without which the alarmists don’t have a leg to stand on. This was an error started by Hansen, broken further by Schlesinger and has been canonized since AR1. In effect, they violated all of the preconditions set forth by Bode in order to apply feedback analysis and botched it by such a wide margin ‘climate feedback’ has no relationship to the theory claimed to support it. This specific error is the root of all that’s evil about climate science and the individual responsible, surprise, surprise, is James Hansen who has been widely exposed as an partisan hack masquerading as a scientist who seems more concerned about getting back at the political left for calling him an alarmist lunatic during the Reagan and Bush years then he is about getting the science right.
You might also want to apply some due diligence to the reporting about climate change, where just as the left leaning media has become obsessed with trying to destroy Trump with lies and half truths because his politics differs from theirs, they do the same as they attempt to de-legitimize actual science when the results don’t conform to the IPCC’s political narrative as they hype sloppy, unrepeatable ‘science’ as ‘settled’.
And BTW, the only ‘effects’ of the imaginary environmental disorder is the psychological disorders all the fear mongering imparts on the gullible masses.
The sea levels aren’t rising much it at all, ice is not disappearing and growing in many places, temperature are not rising and have been relative constant during the last 2 decades (notwithstanding El Nino). The only definitive trend is the multi-thousand year cooling since the current interglacial optimum. Note that it’s conventional to call the peak warming of an interglacial period an ‘optimum’ and not a catastrophe. As a consequence of man’s CO2 emissions, the planet is demonstrably greener.
You should also examine what Paris was all about. Fixing the climate was a smoke screen and the only real purpose was to steal money from the developed world as the ‘green climate fund’ and redistribute it to third world despots.
You should also examine the conflict of interest at the IPCC, which requires a substantial effect by man to justify its existence, yet has manoeuvred itself to be the arbiter of what is and what is not climate science by what thy choose to publish in their reports.
There’s just so much wrong with ‘consensus’ climate science as defined by IPCC reports it would be hilarious if the economic consequences of spending trillions to fix a problem that can’t exist weren’t so hash.

Jack..
I used to buy into this alarmism, for twenty years. Then one day I needed to prepare a speech on the subject. After buying several books on the subject, I noted a pattern of omission on the alarmist side, and facts well presented on the cool heads side.
After hundreds of hours of reading, I had to reluctantly conclude that the skeptics were the honest ones. Then came Climategate. Ouch! Blatant lying and manipulation at the highest levels going on, around the world.
Suffice to say that into not share your concerns at all now.

Sailboarder,
It is easy to present a well reasoned linear argument which appears to be compelling. Some of the reasoning on this forum is very much like that – it seems compelling if you are unaware of or choose to ignore the complexity of the situation being examined. In its extreme, ‘CO2 is plant food, it’s good for the planet’. Much of the argument here is in that vein, though not so patently stupid.
Real scientists are aware of the complexity and of the great unknown they are probing. They have respect for chaos.

Jack,
You’re falling back on the same tired old argument that the climate is so complex, mere physics can’t describe it and mere mortals can’t understand it (sounds more like a religious argument…). In fact, when you break the climate down into smaller elements, it becomes very simple. Excess complexity is just a crutch to cover up the fact that the immutable laws of physics defy the consensus at every turn which makes deception, obfuscation and outright lies the primary tool used by the consensus to ignorantly perpetuate the IPCC’s destructive agenda.
The Earth is a simple thermodynamic system with power arriving from the Sun and power emitted by the planet consequential to a surface warmed by stored energy. There are no internal sources of power and natural systems are relatively linear in the energy domain (all Joules are equivalent). There’s certainly chaos exhibited in the transitions between states which we call weather, but weather is not the climate.

Reply to Jack Davis:
Climate is insensitive to increasing atmospheric CO2 – the alleged global warming crisis does not exist. We have known this reality for decades, and published this conclusion in 2002.
This disagreement was initially attributed to errors within the warmist camp. The bullying and egregious misconduct by the warmists and later the Climategate emails made it clear that the warmists’ allegations were not just false, but clearly and deliberately fraudulent.
Global warming alarmism is the greatest fraud, in financial terms, in human history.
************************************https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/10/claim-climate-science-does-not-have-to-be-falsifiable/comment-page-1/#comment-2578369
[excerpt]
In fact, the ~35-year global cooling period that commenced in ~1940 adequately falsifies the hypothesis that increasing atmospheric CO2 is a significant driver of global warming. The CAGW hypo is further falsified by the current ~20-year “Pause” in global temperatures.
That is why the warmists have more recently been falsifying the temperature data records to minimize the ~35-year cooling period and increase their alleged warming during the Pause.https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/giss-1981-2002-2014-global.gif
Conclusion:
Since 1940 there has been ~22 years of positive correlation of temperature with CO2, and ~55 years of negative or ~zero correlation. The global warming hypo is contradicted by a full-Earth-scale test since 1940. CO2 is NOT a significant driver of global warming.
Regards, Allan

Allan,
I wouldn’t say that CO2 has no effect on the temperature, just that the effect it does have has been over-stated by at least a factor of 4 which represents the difference between an effect that we should be wary of and an effect that should be embraced as nothing but beneficial.

CO2isnotevil,
I agree CO2 is not evil, just as a car that might run you down is not evil. But the guy behind the wheel of the car might be guilty of being careless or evil. We are behind the wheel of industry, producing CO2, and we’re fast reaching the point where to continue to deny the science is to go past careless and get to evil.
Your climate sensitivity argument is sophistry. There are as many determinations as there are scientists calculating, and the complexity of the global mix of factors makes that completely understandable.
What is clear to any unbiased observer is that planet Earth is retaining more of the solar radiation energy it receives than formerly. The physical manifestations of that retained heat are also now patently obvious to an unbiased observer.

Jack,
My climate sensitivity argument is the furthest thing from sophistry possible, unless you consider the laws of physics, specifically COE and the SB LAW, fallacious. Feel free to suggest other laws of physics that supercede these ones.
As I said before, you and many others have been conditioned to believe that the climate is too complex to quantify with first principles physics. This is completely wrong and anti-science, but the alarmists must resort to this this tactic because the laws of physics are definitely not on their side. But I must say, if the goal was to confuse the public in order to gain support for what the physics precludes, the IPCC and the self serving consensus it crafted around the reports it generates has succeeded in its bombastic mission.
If anyone is guilty of sophistry, its the IPCC whose fallacious arguments are designed to trigger an emotional response, rather than provide a scientific explanation. If you want examples of blatant sophistry, all you need to to is peruse the IPCC AR’s, especially the summaries for policymakers where anything remotely related to real science is woefully misrepresented.
Here’s a simple task for you. The IPCC claims a nominal increase of 0.8C per W/m^2. This increases surface emissions by 4.3 W/m^2. One of these W/m^2 comes from the forcing. Enumerate the laws of physics that explain the origin of other 3.3 W/m^2, keeping in mind that for the surface to emit 4.3 W/m^2 more, it must be receiving 4.3 W/m^2 more, otherwise it will loose energy and cool. If you don’t believe that an 0.8C temperature increases surface emissions by 4.3 W/m^2, explain the physics that supports otherwise.
If you think the 3.3 W/m^2 are the result of massive positive feedback (which is what the consensus believes), explain the physics behind it and why each of the other 240 W/m^2 of forcing from the Sun are not also resulting in 3.3 W/m^2 of ‘feedback’, for if they were, the surface temperature would be close to the boiling point of water. Keep in mind that all Joules are capable of performing the same amount of work, maintaining the planets temperature takes work, the unit of work is the Joule and that one Watt is one Joules per second.

CO2 is not evil:
You are misquoting me. I wrote:
“Climate is insensitive to increasing atmospheric CO2.”
This does not mean that ECS=0, which is a statement of excess precision.
It does means that ECS is so small that increasing atmospheric CO2 poses no threat to humanity or the environment. You say ECS is exaggerated by at least 4 times – yes, at least that much.
Furthermore, there is overwhelming evidence that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans is not dangerously high – it is dangerously low, too low for the continued survival of carbon-based life on Earth.
I have written about the vital issue of “CO2 starvation” since 2009 or earlier, and recently others including Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, have also written on this subject.
As a devoted fan of carbon-based life on Earth, I feel it is my duty to advocate on our behalf. To be clear, I am not prejudiced against non-carbon-based life forms, but I really do not know any of them well enough to form an opinion. They could be very nice. 🙂
Regards, Allan
My post from 2009:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/#comment-79426
Patrick Moore from 2016:https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/moore-positive-impact-of-human-co2-emissions.pdf
Executive Summary
This study looks at the positive environmental effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a topic which has been well established in the scientific literature but which is far too often ignored in the current discussions about climate change policy. All life is carbon based and the primary source of this carbon is the CO2 in the global atmosphere. As recently as 18,000 years ago, at the height of the most recent major glaciation, CO2 dipped to its lowest level in recorded history at 180 ppm, low enough to stunt plant growth.
This is only 30 ppm above a level that would result in the death of plants due to CO2 starvation. It is calculated that if the decline in CO2 levels were to continue at the same rate as it has over the past 140 million years, life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now and would slowly perish almost entirely as carbon continued to be lost to the deep ocean sediments. The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees. Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.
[end of Exec Summary]

Allan,
Yes, I certainly agree that increased atmospheric CO2 offers more benefits than harm to the planet and its biosphere and that CO2 levels have been on a catastrophic long term downward trajectory. Luckily, we’re able to recover some of the lost carbon by burning fossil fuels. As I’ve said many times before, our biggest concern once we run out of fossil fuels will be how to keep atmospheric CO2 levels high enough to keep agriculture from crashing.
I just reel at statements that can lead warmists to claim that something which can be supported by physics is not accepted. It’s important to be precise. They’ll take one misuse of a word to imply much that’s not true, which in this was case was insensitive meaning ‘not sensitive’ which from a language perspective is an absolute.
BTW, the only non carbon based life form we’ll ever need to worry about is silicon based, once computers learn how to reproduce themselves without help from man (this is closer then you might think …).

Hi CO2, and thank you for your comments.
I do not want to debate the meaning of the word “insensitive” – if you prefer, please insert the prefix “relatively”.
I leave the rest to Jann Arden – I became friends with her brother Ritchie years ago when he ran the Arden Diner on 17th Ave SW in Calgary.
Regards, Allan
Insensitive – Jann Arder

Jack Davis
August 14, 2017 at 7:08 pm: Jack, we have been fighting for realistic physics for years, against abusive li@rs. Your veiled threat tells your tale, but we are winning now. So place it where the sun don’t shine. Nor will we ever cease.
You could give us your physical proofs of course. They would be welcome and respected in the manner they are given, or better……..

CO2isnotevil – I am a climate skeptic, but I could not disagree more with you on your statement that climate is a “simple” matter of thermodynamics. If it were, the earth’s climate would have been a constant since the formation of the planet and its atmosphere billions of years ago. Obviously, climate has been anything but constant.
You are actually arguing on behalf of the warmists who declare constantly that warming is a simple problem – add CO2, warmer climate. Voila!
Not hardly. Our system is extremely complex and cannot be modeled effectively with any computer model. The interactions between astrophysical processes (not just sunlight, but other forms of solar radiation, as well as other forms of radiation in space that constantly bombard Earth), biological systems (uhh, you do realize that most of the oxygen in our atmosphere was created by living organisms, don’t you?), geochemical systems (sequestration of carbon and other greenhouse gases in rocks, sediments, and seawater), as well as variations in the earth’s tilt and orbit of the sun, etc.
What we know is that CO2 is one of several greenhouse gases, but what we don’t know is whether CO2 is a major contributor to warming, or is more of a lagging indicator of warming. The variations we’ve seen in Earth’s climate are known – how all the elements of the current system interact to cause it to vary are not well understood, theories at best.

Point taken Raines – besides, the bubbles in the beer are contributing.
Allan McRae is getting around to an argument I’ve always made – It’s indisputable that CO2 is a major driver of the greenhouse effect which makes Earth habitable. It is also plain that we are currently pumping far too much of it into the atmosphere and overheating and creating toxic effects. Through our creditable decision across the planet to invest greatly in planetary science, we are well aware of the problem and what has to be done to address it. If we do address it successfully, we’ll come through with a powerful ability to manage the climate to give us an indefinite era of very friendly climatic conditions.
I disagree with you – a lot of good science gets discussed at the pub.
Cheers

“ It’s indisputable that CO2 is a major driver of the greenhouse effect”
No. Rising CO₂; Warming stopped.
“we are currently pumping far too much of it into the atmosphere and creating toxic effects”
No. CO₂ is not toxic. All effects we can see so far are beneficial. The climate models tell sh!t.
“[CO₂] makes Earth habitable”
Yes. At about 150 ppmv all life will go extinct.
“we’ll come through with a powerful ability to manage the climate”
Pure arrogance.

Pruitt makes a mistake in implying that “peer-reviewed” might be objective in the climate science industry. It is effectively broken in this field. This goes back decades, even before peer-reviewd experts like William Gray were cut off from federal funding by Al Gore for not singing from the alarmist hymnsheet.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/18/rip-dr-william-gray-hurricane-forecast-pioneer-climate-skeptic/
Honesty, scientific integrity, peer-review, kid gloves, and the nice-guy approach failed a long time ago in climate science. Pruitt and Trump need to remember that.

I think they have to tiptoe toward that truth. We are the team that is coming from behind. Eyes on the prize is important and we can’t get too “rammy”. Forthright works where there is hard evidence is available or where the AGW story seems obviously false. People still believe in science and fail to understand how corrupted this field has become. that needs to be revealed to them by degrees. I believe by careful review of the bedrock papers of their hypothesis which will result in powerful refutations.

The ENSO meter has backed from positive to now tracking neutral.
There is still a chance that a La Nina will develop late 2017/early 2018, and if so (depending upon the strength of the La Nina, and/or its persistence) there is the prospect that the pause will once more reappear but will now be more than 20 years in duration.
That would be awkward not simply to a review of this report, but also for the writing of AR6.
Nature may yet have another laugh at our hubris.

Come on now – the very small segment of the graph you are crowing about covers maybe three years and is a minor variability blip on a trend which is obviously accelerating. That’s the oldest error in the book, drawing conclusions from a tiny time segment.

You claimed the green ‘observed’ curve is following the path predicted for ‘high mitigation’. It is not, it momentarily has pointed that way, but keep on watching – it will prove to be a momentary blip.
The ‘modelled historical’ is a check on the power of the model. This model seems to be a good one – it has ‘predicted’ the past in close agreement with the observed data.
I suggest that your failure to understand my point indicates you should look to your reading skills.

“is a check on the power of the model” No, it’s not. It actually shows that models are extremely bad. They needed a pseudo scientific numerology called ‘harmonization’ to fool layman that they are good. In fact, extremely idiotic interpolation schemes can do way much better than those expensive delusional computer games. And for your info, there are an infinity of wrong curves that pass through a finite number of points from a data set. The mere fact that a numerology can fit some points is not a proof that the model is powerful, it’s just a proof that people are gullible and fall for the elephant wiggling its tail due of parametrization.

From the article: “Scientists called his [Pruitt’s] remarks troubling,”
No, *some* scientists call his remarks troubling. Other scientists do not.
The alarmists always want us to think they speak for all of science, but they don’t, of course. More appeal to authority. Still no evidence of CAGW.

From the article: ““The implication of [Pruitt’s statement] is that it hasn’t been linked to the data,” she said of the report. “That certainly is not true. This is built on a mountain of evidence.”
If that’s the case, then explain why human-produced CO2 is increasing while the temperatures are not increasing. According to your “mountain of evidence” CO2 and temperatures are supposed to rise together. But they are not doing that. Please throw us a scap of evidence from your mountain.
What the CAGW narrative is really built on is a mountain of speculation. No evidence in sight.

“The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies that humans are causing climate change by putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a clear increase in global temperatures”
With the assumption but without the empirical evidence that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2997420

chaamjamal,
It’s not that there’s no evidence that fossil fuel emissions contribute to atmospheric Co2 and most skeptics accept this without question. The evidence that’s missing is any physical support for the absurdly high climate sensitivity they claim and which exaggerates the effect incremental CO2 has on the surface temperature by nearly a factor of 4.

I may misunderstand Chaamjamal’s point but I have wondered if at least some of the rising CO2 levels are due to outgassing from the oceans as I believe this is the cause of the historical relationship whereby rising temps preceded CO2 increases. I suppose if this is the case then we should be looking for an 800 year lag which doesn’t exist as far as i know, but it seems climate science only seeks what it wants to find.

John,
The more logical reason for the lag is biology since outgassing is more or less concurrent with any temperature rise.
The lag on warming occurs as it takes centuries for new forests to arise in land that was previously covered by ice. Until man started emitting CO2 in significant quantities, the steady state atmospheric CO2 concentration was a proxy for the total amount of global biomass. More plants means both more CO2 is required and more is being generated by decomposition. Biology is more or less CO2 limited and it also takes a while for it to sequester enough natural sources of CO2 into the biological carbon cycle and this also contributes to the delay.
On the falling side, ice accumulates slowly, gradually decreasing the tree line until is drops to zero. Again, it takes centuries for advancing ice to swallow a forest.
About the lag. The 800 year lag is from Vostok, but newer cores with better temporal resolution, like DomeC show lags of only 2-3 centuries.

From the article: “His comments Thursday came the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a separate report confirming that 2016 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the records set in each of the two previous years.”
Records were not set in the two previous years before 2016 according to the satellite charts. 2014 and 2015 were way below 1998, and 2016 was only one-tenth of a degree hotter than 1998.
The alarmists wanted to pretend that 2014 was the “hottest year evah!”, and then that 2015 was even hotter than that, and that 2016 was even hotter than that. That way they could say “hotter and hotter” over and over again as part of their CAGW mantra.
But, they couldn’t do that using the satellite charts because they don’t show that fiction, they show reality, so NOAA and NASA charlatans decided to bastardize the surface temperature charts to make things look like they are getting hotter and hotter, as a means of promoting the CAGW fairy tale and money-making machine.
As you can see in the satellite chart below, 2014 and 2015 and every year back to 1998, were “also-rans”. They didn’t come close to being the “hottest year evah!” NOAA and NASA charlatans are lying to us and a lot of people have been duped by their machinations.http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_July_2017_v6.jpg

It means that global average temperature is a fiction. A made up number created either out of a deficient and adjustable collection of other made up numbers or cut from whole cloth via anomalies and other machinations. It is what the boogey man wears!

Your questions would be appropriate if the “measured” liner average of average of average temperatures actually had some relation to the Earth’s energy balance. Unfortunately, as radiative energy balance has to do with T^4, that is not the case. Sorry.

It means that global average temperature is a fiction. A made up number created either out of a deficient and adjustable collection of other made up numbers…

GISS openly acknowledge that that is indeed the case.

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT)
Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created?
A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a ‘climatology’) hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.

As far as I know, the margins of error preclude the possibility of the pause being broken ‘significantly’. Which means no breach of cause, no record global annual Ts lately in actual fact.
In spite of the current drone.

John Harmsworth has given you the flippant answer, I’ll put my serious surmise, and put it up for shooting down as it is not really my field:
My guess is that the relatively random fluctuations are produced by the chaotic dynamics of what we call the troposphere. We are measuring atmospheric temperature but the atmosphere is in constant thermal exchange with the oceans, and the oceans are in a chaotic churning which some years sees an upchurn of relatively warm water (la Niña? ) and other years of cool water (el Niño?). Those extremes and all possible points between could explain a lot of the variation, and there would be many other sources of variation such as different extent of sea ice from year to year – possibly feedback from the ocean upswelling and possibly drivers of it.
In short, it’s a chaotic system which means jagged curves are to be expected.

“What is it that the satellites are measuring and then turning into temperatures?”
I agree that’s a good question Forrest, and admit I don’t know either.
Looking at that graph, the huge spike just before Al Gore lost to GWB was maybe happily posed to present Al with a new hobby to distract him from the disappointment of political defeat.
Maybe we can forgive him some of the more extreme predictions in his first film – if he was watching closely, that spike really would have been alarming.

RE the “spiky up-and-down” nature of global temperature:
The oceans are the primary driver for global temperatures – the Nino3.4 temperature is an excellent predictor of tropical temperature three months in the future, and global temperature four months in the future. Nino3.4 and the Aerosol Optical Depth volcano Index are the two most important leading parameters, followed by the AMO. CO2 apparently has negligible impact. Longer term, the integral of solar activity is probably the primary driver.
Kindly read the following – intelligent critiques are welcomed, PROVIDED THEY ACTUALLY HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS AND ARE COHERENT WITH THE DATA.
Regards, Allan
Post script:
Incidentally, CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales, from ~~300 to 800 years in the ice core record to ~9 months in the modern data record, on a shorter time cycle (dCO2/dt changes ~contemporaneously with global temperature, and its integral atmospheric CO2 lags by about 9 months). If climate sensitivity to CO2 (“ ECS”) was significant, CO2 would not lag temperature at all measured time scales and this close relationship would not be apparent in the data record:http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
My original paper on this subject was published on icecap.us in 2002, and is finally gaining some traction.
“Temperature drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature.”
Post post script:
This “non-linear, chaotic, blah blah” climate system gives us obvious clues as to how it works, IF one cares to actually look at the data rather than obsess on false climate models.
___________________________https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/16/october-2016-global-surface-landocean-and-lower-troposphere-temperature-anomaly-update/comment-page-1/#comment-2342825
NOT A WHOLE LOTTA GLOBAL WARMING GOIN’ ON!
[excerpt}
Bill Illis has created a temperature model that actually works in the short-term (multi-decades). It shows global temperatures correlate primarily with NIno3.4 area temperatures – an area of the Pacific Ocean that is about 1% of global surface area. There are only four input parameters, with Nino3.4 being the most influential. CO2 has almost no influence. So what drives the Nino3.4 temperatures? Short term, the ENSO. Longer term, probably the integral of solar activity – see Dan Pangburn’s work.
Bill’s post is here.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/23/lewandowsky-and-cook-deniers-cannot-provide-a-coherent-alternate-worldview/comment-page-1/#comment-2306066
Bill’s equation is:
Tropics Troposphere Temp = 0.288 * Nino 3.4 Index (of 3 months previous) + 0.499 * AMO Index + -3.22 * Aerosol Optical Depth volcano Index + 0.07 Constant + 0.4395*Ln(CO2) – 2.59 CO2 constant
Bill’s graph is here – since 1958, not a whole lotta global warming goin’ on!https://s16.postimg.org/iynkqumyd/UAH_RSS_Had_AT_Tropics_Model_Aug16.png
My simpler equation using only the Nino3.4 Index Anomaly is:
UAHLTcalc Global (Anom. in degC, ~four months later) = 0.20*Nino3.4IndexAnom + 0.15
Data: Nino3.4IndexAnom is at: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/sstoi.indices
It shows that much or all of the apparent warming since ~1982 is a natural recovery from the cooling impact of two major volcanoes – El Chichon and Pinatubo.
Here is the plot of my equation:https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1106756229401938&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater
I agree with Bill’s conclusion that
THE IMPACT OF INCREASING ATMOSPHERIC CO2 ON GLOBAL TEMPERATURE IS SO CLOSE TO ZERO AS TO BE MATERIALLY INSIGNIFICANT.
Regards, Allan

Hello Forrest.
First, my post seems to have lost all its vertical spacing – sorry about that. Also, the plots were not displayed, just referenced.
In answer to your question, here is the plot by BIll Illis that shows the “spikiness” of the tropical temperature, which tracks and lags Nino3,4 temperature by ~3 months.https://s16.postimg.org/iynkqumyd/UAH_RSS_Had_AT_Tropics_Model_Aug16.png
My simpler model, which has the same pattern, shows global temperature tracking and lagging Nino3,4 temperature by ~4 months. The cooling impact of major volcanoes in 1982 and 1991 is apparent.https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1106756229401938&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater
The mechanism is that increasing Nino3,4 temperature increases tropical atmospheric water vapour, the PRIMARY greenhouse gas, and the tropics warm, and the rest of the Earth warms ~one month later. ENSO variability drives Nino3,4 temperatures. Longer term, the integral of solar activity is probably the primary driver of global temperature..
Then there is incontrovertible observation that CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales, from ~~300 to 800 years in the ice core record to ~9 months in the modern data record, on a shorter time scale. This suggest, like other evidence, that the sensitivity of climate to increasing atmospheric CO2 is very small, and global warming alarmism is nonsense.
In the modern data record, the velocity dCO2/dt changes ~contemporaneously with global temperature, and its integral atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by about 9 months. Other drivers of atmospheric CO2 include fossil fuel combustion, land use changes, etc.
If climate sensitivity to CO2 (“ ECS”) was significant, CO2 would not lag temperature at all measured time scales and this close relationship would not be apparent in the data record. I wrote the original paper on this observation in January 2008 and it is finally getting some attention. See the reference in my above post.
Not all that complicated, is it, for a “non-linear, chaotic, blah blah blah” climate system?
The complicated climate computer models used by the alarmist IPCC fail to model the aforementioned real observations, and assume that CO2 is THE major driver of global climate – this assumption is false and the models produce nonsense – there is no real global warming crisis.
Regards, Allan

From the article: “Pruitt told the Texas radio show that his agency would review the 13-agency report “like all other 12 agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and the methodology and accuracy of the report.”
WUWT will be doing the same thing.

I think Pruitt should have a report on the details of the egregious adjustment process that Hansen’s GISS had on pushing down the 1930s temperatures. As late as 2007, US dust bowl temperatures were still the highest despite adjustments already made! In that year, they deducted over 1.5 C. The rationale when 1998 didn’t break the record was that this is as only the US and it represented only 3%of the globe. Here is how it used to look:https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/image51.png
As it turns out, the 1930s were the hottest in widely scattered locales globally, too, powerful corroboration for the verity of the unadjusted US longterm record. Here is Cape Town S. Africa in the southern hemisphere:https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/clip_image0022.gif
The same pattern is to be found in Canada, Greenland, Siberia and Paraguay, etc. (You can check it out, the mod doesn’t like multiple links)

The US chart comes from Paul Homewood’s UK blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat
The Capetown S Africa from WUWT.
They’re OK to take. Meanwhile, there are also almost the same looking graphs for Nuuk Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Asuncion (Paraguay) , etc. It would make a great post and would influence the “debate” under Scott Pruitt.
They mutually corroborate the case for a real world warmest period in the 1930s and 40s as yet unsurpassed. The adjusters take advantage of some data discontinuities, time of observation variations and a station move or two in order to get their hands on the data to corrupt it. It perhaps may be legitimate to make some changes, but the evidence from corroboration is that their changes are far to great. The raw data tells that recordings were reasonably good for most of the records of these locales.

Some support in raw & official data re Australia’s 2 largest cities (which also have the longest T records).
An Australian map like the one you show for Cape Town is difficult, because it uses gridded data and I don’t have the programs to mimic the gridded averages.
The main point is that this hot day analysis does not support the simplest of global warming theory.
Geoff.http://www.geoffstuff.com/century_days_sydmelb.jpg

Richard,
It is easy to get abused when you mention how much.
Clearly, any atmospheric heating would not work measurably if there were only a few molecules of CO2 in the air. As you increase the CO2 concentration, you reach a point where there is enough CO2 to produce a measurable response. It is like doing colorimetry on solutions that are too dilute, too clear, to move the needle on the colorimeter.
Nobody, in all the papers I have read, has calculated this minimum. It is typically couched in dimensionless units like ratios, doublings etc. which is a way around a problem. I would be delighted to read of this threshhold before action. Can anyone help?
Geoff.

“As you increase the CO2 concentration, you reach a point where there is enough CO2 to produce a measurable response. It is like doing colorimetry on solutions that are too dilute, too clear, to move the needle on the colorimeter.
Nobody, in all the papers I have read, has calculated this minimum. It is typically couched in dimensionless units like ratios, doublings etc. which is a way around a problem. I would be delighted to read of this threshhold before action. Can anyone help?”
Good question, Geoff. And that there is no answer to your question currently, just shows that climate science is not quite ready for “prime time”. Lots of unanswered, basic questions still outstanding.

Does this report include any positives such as a greening planet, more food, less starvation, fewer deaths from cold, in other words a better planet.
Something else I have never seen is an global map of where these temperature increases will occur. It is pretty far stretched to claim one temperature graph will cover each and every square inch of the planet. There have to be gradients of heat, rainfall, increased greening, etc. You can’t just claim that any warming is bad, that is not science. It is the same as saying any temperature rebound from the LIA is disastrous. There must be assessments of geography and benefits to life also.

A National Climate Assessment has to look at more than just CO2 and temperature changes. It must also assess climate changes in different areas of the globe. Without this, I would simply return it and say “you’re not done”!

Jim Gorman, you generally won’t see local maps of where global-warming is going to have its alleged most serious effects. This is because the regional predictions of climate models are even worse than their global predictions.
The most famous ‘local’ prediction of global-warming theory was in fact in the upper troposphere in the tropics. The so called “tropospheric hot-spot”. All the models agreed. Yet all the models got it badly wrong. So they just don’t talk about it anymore. Big fail. But this was the sort of self-test that a few real scientists in the field set themselves.
The models fail the biggest tests of skill, so the proponents go constantly searching, searching for minor successes that will occur happen-stance every now and again by virtue of pure statistical luck, but might make a good press headline. It is not science. It does not even approach the art of fishing.

Thanks for the response. Pruitt needs to point this out to the press. What good is a National Climate Assessment if you can’t even give accurate predictions for the U.S., let alone the NH 10, 50, 100 years from now? All these crying scientists need to be put on the fire. They are the experts, they should damn well give us good assessments, or be told we will find someone who will!

” … has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review …”
The ‘consensus’ claims that 1 W/m2 of forcing can be amplified into the 4.3 W/m2 required to replenish the increased surface emissions arising from a surface temperature 0.8C higher than the current average of 288K. This is ridiculous considering that 240 W/m2 of total solar forcing results in only 390 W/m2 of radiant emissions from the surface where each W/m2 of forcing results in only 1.6 W/m2 of surface emissions. All Joules are equivalent, thus all W/m2, including the last one, results in the same 1.6 W/m2 of surface emissions, so the idea that the next one would result in 4.3 W/m2 is absurd beyond belief. Such a result could ONLY arise by violating COE and/or the SB Law, both of which are immutable physical laws.
This represents such an obviously fatal error in consensus climate science that either the claimed sensitivity was never subject to peer review or the veracity of climate science peer review is nil, either one of which deprecates the entire body of ‘consensus’ climate science research and publishing.
Pruitt clearly understands this and that a scientifically robust peer review of the IPCC’s supporting science is an absolute necessity.

I agree. This should and can be a loose thread that needs to be pulled. As parts and pieces of this interconnected work of fiction begin to unravel the world will start to see that there is no truth in it. Whether in the parts or the whole.

I hope what the Trump Administration does is to acknowledge the report, identify it as being produced from scientists held over from the Obama administration, and say that it does not represent the findings or policy of the Trump Administration. Then Pruitt and his crowd should issue a short report detailing the areas of the report that they don’t agree with, and get after appointing a “red team” or Trump team to produce a thorough report giving the administrations view of these matters.
The Trump people should not tinker with or try to alter the report, but should leave it as is — a statement of holdover scientists and one which we will respond to shortly. Do not give the agw crowd an opportunity to complain that the denialist Trump people are tampering with sacred consensus science.

…. and then contract an independent auditing firm to audit temperature data going forward. Maybe two, to keep them both honest. Expensive yes, but firing 100 climate “scientists” ought to cover it. Two birds with one stone.
After they got the systems running, they could then move on to auditing retrospectively too.

Pruitt has put the stench of politics on the report and previous work already. That’s how he begins to prepare the ground for alternate opinion and house cleaning. I think he is being pretty crafty. It can’t happen overnight and as much as I am not a fan of Trump the man I think it is important for the future of the Western world that he wins a second term so that some of these economic initiatives can unfold properly.

In 1976 NASA published an analysis of literally millions of data points for the entire atmosphere using real physics: the US Standard Atmosphere Model. This was done to support the Space Program. Yes, it IS rocket science! They accounted for all temperature and pressure variations based on solar energy input. thermodynamics, gravity and the MASS of the atmosphere (NOT, the composition). With minor tweaks it became the world standard. This semi-empirical model does NOT use “radiative forcing,” “heat trapping,” or “radiative imbalance” from any greenhouse gases in their physical chemical calculations. The people who are talking about ‘greenhouse gases’ simply do not understand heat capacity or the adiabatic lapse rate.

This is a point not often enough made.
Also around that time, GISS assessed sensitivity to CO2 and concluded that it was very low. They assessed an 8 fold increase in CO2 would cause less than 2 degC warming.
Thus NASA/GISS were assessing Climate Sensitivity at less than 0.7degC per doubling.

OT folks, sorry.
But Gore is spouting his crap on BBC Radio 2 right now 18:20 hrs BST. It is probably the most popular radio station in the UK.
And he started by telling everyone that extreme weather events are becomeing more frequent and harsher!
#sickofhtiscnut

I caught the five minutes before the 6 o’clock news, where Gore, using his understanding, explain-it-to-the little-people tone of voice, was calling the fossil-fuel users irresponsible polluters, turning the sky into a sewer for the rest of humanity. The interviewer commented favourably on Gore’s film’s assertion that renewables, especially solar, have now become so cheap that it would be planetary irresponsibility not to use this technology. Tell that to the farmers who live near the Baogang Steel and Rare Earth Complex in Inner Mongolia.
I accept that Auntie has become a mouthpiece for the watermelons, but to hear first hand the . . . patronising guff from the manbearpig made my fists clench.
Like the hashtag, HotScot

Cynical Seamus
Appreciate the like. 🙂
What really effed me off was that Gore’s Radio 2 interview, and the even worse one with the snivelling sycophant Frank Skinner on Absolute radio last night, was that both were pre recorded.
Not even the usual opportunity to text or email questions or comments, just a carefully scripted, non contestable Gore propaganda statement.
Even his ‘self deprecating’ joke was repeated verbatim on both broadcasts.
He makes my skin crawl!
#carboncreditpirate

“The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” fair question the answer to which depends if they use climate ‘scientists’, they do in that h case the answer is no it will not but third rate , at best , people who very much have self interest and political outlooks at heart .
‘Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,’ this will have cause the need new pants all around for the climate ‘science’ community , because ‘they only want to find something wrong with it , and who needs facts when you have faith .
‘This is built on a mountain of evidence.’ Only if do what you should and include ‘model results ‘ has evidence .
‘Staffers at EPA had already signed off on an earlier draft.’, pigs will never vote for less rather than more food .

“The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” fair question the answer to which depends if they use climate ‘scientists’, they do in that h case the answer is no it will not but third rate , at best , people who very much have self interest and political outlooks at heart .
‘Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,’ this will have cause the need new pants all around for the climate ‘science’ community , because ‘they only want to find something wrong with it , and who needs facts when you have faith .
‘This is built on a mountain of evidence.’ Only if do what you should not and include ‘model results ‘ has evidence .
‘Staffers at EPA had already signed off on an earlier draft.’, pigs will never vote for less rather than more food .

“Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,” Pruitt told a Texas radio show Thursday. “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”
Amen!

It is essential that the EPA revisit the basic science rather than simply accept the group-think of the eco-left academic establishment scientific community..
NATURAL CYCLES DRIVE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Climate is controlled by natural cycles. Earth is just past the 2003+/- peak of a millennial cycle and the current cooling trend will likely continue until the next Little Ice Age minimum at about 2650.See the Energy and Environment paper at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
Here is the abstract:
“ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities. Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver is discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak -inversion point – in the UAH6 temperature trend in about 2003. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made. If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.”
The forecasts in Fig 12 of my paper are similar to those in Ludecke et al.
It is well past time for a paradigm shift in the forecasting methods used by establishment climate science. The whole dangerous global warming delusion is approaching collapse
Ludecke etal also emphasizes the importance of the Millennial Cycle and support my forecasts of a coming long term cooling .
Harmonic Analysis of Worldwide Temperature Proxies for 2000 Years
Horst-Joachim Lüdecke1, *, Carl-Otto Weiss2
The Open Atmospheric Science Journal
ISSN: 1874-2823 ― Volume 11, 2017
Year: 2017
Volume: 11
First Page: 44
Last Page: 53
Publisher Id: TOASCJ-11-44
DOI: 10.2174/1874282301711010044
“Abstract
The Sun as climate driver is repeatedly discussed in the literature but proofs are often weak. In order to elucidate the solar influence, we have used a large number of temperature proxies worldwide to construct a global temperature mean G7 over the last 2000 years. The Fourier spectrum of G7 shows the strongest components as ~1000-, ~460-, and ~190 – year periods whereas other cycles of the individual proxies are considerably weaker. The G7 temperature extrema coincide with the Roman, medieval, and present optima as well as the well-known minimum of AD 1450 during the Little Ice Age. We have constructed by reverse Fourier transform a representation of G7 using only these three sine functions, which shows a remarkable Pearson correlation of 0.84 with the 31-year running average of G7. The three cycles are also found dominant in the production rates of the solar-induced cosmogenic nuclides 14C and 10Be, most strongly in the ~190 – year period being known as the De Vries/Suess cycle. By wavelet analysis, a new proof has been provided that at least the ~190-year climate cycle has a solar origin.”
The paper also states “……G7, and likewise the sine representations have maxima of comparable size at AD 0, 1000, and 2000. We note that the temperature increase of the late 19th and 20th century is represented by the harmonic temperature representation, and thus is of pure multiperiodic nature. It can be expected that the periodicity of G7, lasting 2000 years so far, will persist also for the foreseeable future. It predicts a temperature drop from present to AD 2050, a slight rise from 2050 to 2130, and a further drop from AD 2130 to 2200 (see Fig. 3), upper panel, green and red curves.”
The EPA therefore has available for immediate use a forecasting method which is not based on the bottom up approach of the IPCC modellers which is inherently useless

The problem is that the EPA as it is presently structured and staffed is not “fit for purpose”. It needs some hard headed physicists at the top to provide some semblance of scientific objectivity to what has become a hideout for incompetent and venal opportunists. People who produce crap for government policy purposes should have it thrown back in their faces and their future funding restricted.

The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate the changing patterns of events in time and space. This requires a set of skills different from the reductionist and mathematical/statistical approach to nature, usually used by physicists but which is essential for investigating past climates and forecasting future climate trends. It is necessary to build an understanding of the patterns and a narrative of general trends from an integrated overview of the actual individual local and regional time series of particular variables. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good empirical understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities which include the principal components of the observed emergent phenomena. When analyzing or comparing data time series geologists refer to a stratigraphic unit that serves as the standard of reference as a “type section”. In climatology it is useful when illustrating hypotheses to talk in terms of “type reconstructions”. Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is the iconic example. It is necessary also to be cognizant of the fact that the emergent time series will reflect turning points and threshold effects in the underlying physical process interactions. Such turning points mark the major inflection points in temperature and solar activity time series and serve as geologists would say as “golden spikes” when analyzing and forecasting temperature and solar activity trends.
Establishment climate model forecast outcomes included two serious errors of scientific judgment in the method of approach to climate forecasting and thus in the subsequent advice to policy makers in successive SPMs. First, as previously discussed, the analyses were based on inherently untestable, incomputable and specifically structurally flawed models, which included many unlikely assumptions. Second, the natural solar-driven, millennial and multi-decadal cycles plainly visible in the data were totally ignored. Unless we know the phase of the millennial and 60-year cycles in particular, useful forecasting is simply impossible. I would, in contrast, contend that by adopting the appropriate time scale and method for analysis, a commonsense heuristic working hypothesis with sufficient likely accuracy and chances of success to guide policy has been formulated in the link above
The UNEP, IPCC and UNFCCC rely heavily on the “precautionary principle” to motivate their agendas and action plans. The working hypothesis proposed here provides a broad overview of future climate trends for the N H These could be the basis for more realistic and useful forecasts. In reality, there is very substantial climate variability between the earth’s different geographical regions. It would be prudent to designate regional Type Reconstructions and Solar and temperature Golden Spikes and then build regional narratives of climate trends for the past 2000 years.

Dr. Page
I concur with your assessment but I would particularly point out one aspect (of several) that needs some individual attention. While you ascribe scientific advisements as containing (at least) two errors in approach, I would suggest that the inclusion of the precautionary principle is egregious and intentional. Virtually any future possibility can be conceived (in the 1970’s it was global cooling) and put forth as a justification for action. Selectively, this is not always done.
The IPCC and global “Green” movement has advanced the precautionary principle deliberately as a response to an issue which, if it is real at all, is proceeding exceedingly slowly. So slowly in fact, that it is imperceptible over the last 18 years. So what, exactly, are we supposed to be taking precautions against? More non change? This is just one question they do not want asked as they have no answer for the fact that their magic molecule is pretty damn sedentary. Would not the current pause in warming not, at least, justify a parallel pause in herding us toward an energy starved (if not actually starved) future? This is another question they don’t want to deal with. There are so many!
One cannot fail to conclude that most of climate science operates under the direction of political forces which seek to undermine Western economic strength and progress. The scientists are mostly activists and scientists in name only. Michael Mann is the poster boy of the science- a complete and deliberate fraud!
If we don’t understand the political nature of this battle it is lost!

John
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to select from the evidence and from time to time produce reports which would show that CO2 was the main driver of dangerous climate change and a second recommendation resulted in a meeting in Rio in 1992 chaired by Maurice Strong himself which produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , later signed by 196 governments.
The objective of the treaty is to keep greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that they guessed would prevent dangerous man made interference with the climate system.
This treaty is really a comprehensive, politically driven, political action plan called Agenda 21 designed to produce a centrally managed global society which would control every aspect of the life of every one on earth.
It says :
“The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the
causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or
irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing
such measures”
In other words if the models show there is even a small chance of future warming caused “adverse effects” the Governments who signed the treaty should act immediately to stop it.
In short The UNFCCC Agenda 21 is quite deliberately designed to misuse science for political ends.

“part of a broader, congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review by a 14-person committee at the National Academies. The reviewing scientists backed the report’s conclusion from researchers at 13 federal agencies”

In other words; activists masquerading as government scientists.

““It’s a much more extensive process than a usual peer review, which does not typically come out as a paperback book,” said Bob Kopp, a lead report author and climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Kopp said he has “no idea” what to expect after hearing Pruitt’s comments. Staffers at EPA had already signed off on an earlier draft.”

He’s obviously not expecting serious attention to doctored science and alarmist writings. Now he is panicked.

“Eric Davidson, president of the American Geophysical Union, said the report has undergone “a very rigorous peer-review” and is “built on 50-some years of published research, and each of those papers went through its own peer review.”

Fifty years of layered broken peer review.
That pro-cagw AGU president Davidson is making public pronouncements is extremely indicative that the peer reviewed paper is heavily biased.

““Certainly it’s a possibility, and if the administration doesn’t understand that it’s already peer-reviewed, that really is a sign of concern that he may not understand the process,” Davidson said. “If he’s continuing to question why CO2 is a big deal, that’s also very concerning, because CO2 is a big deal. … To see those quotes continue to come out is definitely disconcerting.”

There are huge differences between “understand the process” and “trust the process”.
Davidson is code speaking that CAGW climate consensual science is the driving force behind this report.

““The question is will it be reviewed by people who are scientific experts or will it be reviewed by people who have a political agenda?” said Kathy Jacobs, who oversaw the broader National Climate Assessment under the Obama administration and now heads the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona.”

This specious claim is a clarion warning to all involved that there is no science involved. Jacobs is dependent on the CAGW scam and seriously conflicted.

“Pruitt told the Texas radio show that his agency would review the 13-agency report “like all other 12 agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and the methodology and accuracy of the report.”

Pruitt is facing a document produced by government committee with activist support that brings into focus how seriously unethical CAGW advocates are.
Pruitt and the Trump Administration should consider this report to be a laundry list of activists to identify, evaluate and reassign or dismiss. An excellent place to start draining the swamp.
Months of background communications; emails, reviews, comments, meeting notes, meeting summaries, text messages, comment documentation, private messages, etc. will all be extremely illuminating.
Those communications will likely identify a larger network of activists that deserve scrutiny.

I liked this –
“he wanted to conduct a “red team, blue team” debate of climate science, a move that his detractors said would put fringe views on the same plane as established, peer-reviewed research.”
It reminds me of being asked why I don’t mind showing someone everything I know. The answer I gave was if they then are better at what I do than I am, then they should have the job. And when discussing something with someone, if they can show me where I am wrong, I have no problem looking into why I saw it differently. What always amazes me is those people that cannot “see” their error when you can present them with the data showing they are wrong. I have never understood the mind that refuses to learn. HOWEVER, if there is an “agenda” other than scientific discovery, I can then understand stonewalling.

‘I have never understood the mind that refuses to learn.’
Here’s a quote from Michael Crichton (speaking through his Ian Malcom character) that covers it pretty well:
“Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.”

This is clearly the right move by EPA Administrator Pruitt.
The so-called “climate science report” is a product of Obama era climate alarmists which presents phony claims of certainty which are manufactured using flawed and failed climate models and schemes of “assessed” probabilities which are nothing but climate alarmist conjecture and speculation disguised as calculated values where none exist.
The politicalized climate alarmist report utilizes UN IPCC AR5 WG1 CMIP5 climate models which have been shown in testimony before Congress to be both flawed and failed in presentation by Dr. Judith Curry and Dr. John Christy respectively.
Additionally the reports claims of certainty are based upon subjective evaluations by climate alarmist scientists which manufacture “assessed” probabilities of likelihood and confidence which are touted as discrete values when in fact these “assessed” probabilities are simply based on conjecture and speculation.
The report completely fails to present data and analysis of the flaws and failures of CMIP5 climate models upon which its analysis is based and compounds this error by disguising likelihood and confidence levels based on conjecture and speculation as being calculated probabilities.
This climate report needs to be scrubbed by objective climate science reviewers and its clear and significant shortcomings and politicalized climate alarmism bias exposed.

It simply needs to be returned and tell them we want a National Climate Assessment that include data, computer runs for the US (all validated of course), good changes to flora and fauna, and what are the costs and benefits? No more CAGW is bad, just because. They also need to know a Global Temperature just isn’t sufficient.

Ian W August 14, 2017 at 9:42 am
+1
Get engineers on board that are used to working with gases and thermodynamics and enthalpy in gases. Have them fully validate and carry out an in depth ‘third party audit’ on the report. No academics, purely practicing engineers.
How about getting engineers to examine the data acquisition of climate data. Back in 1968 some engineers in Brighton UK looked at temperature measurement for climate and discovered that the clean air acts were creating a temperature rise of nearly a degree in the apparent measurements. No enclosure gives a zero rise compared to ambient but the Stevenson screen gave a rise that was quite seriously influenced by direct solar radiation so cleaning the air meant that it was impossible to use historic data meaningfully. The nearest to an accurate figure was obtained by an enclosure with a small extractor fan sucking in outside air. At the time we were actually involved with acid rain so this was an outside activity not really seriously followed up.
Forget the fancy stuff though get engineers and statisticians used to complex signal analysis to determine the actual normal from the complex historic data. One thing is certain. The climate scientists wildly over simplified assumptions are wildly off target. Even good old first year engineering Fourier analysis shows how pathetic the climate fraternity’s view is but there are far more advanced techniques now available but I am uncertain as to the availability of these on the open market and classification levels.

Physicists, statisticians and chemist, yes. To correct the children’s ( climate scientist’s) work. I don’t believe engineers would get sufficient respect from the science community even though they could be helpful. Unfortunate , but they could be used as outside advisors.

Do they ever discuss how temperature readings at different locations are quite possibly giving two different heat contents. Do they just go ahead and assume that all locations have the same parameters and average them anyway?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) served as the administrative lead agency for the preparation of this report. The Federal Science Steering Committee (SSC) comprises representatives from four agencies (NOAA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA], the Department of Energy [DOE], and the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]), the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and three Coordinating Lead Authors, all of whom were Federal employees during the development of this report.
… no possibility of bias there.

In the real world you cannot ADD MATHEMATICALLY radiative fluxes from different sources at different temperatures and then calculate a temperature for the sink using the S-B equation. IT’S UTTER NONSENSE !!
I am now getting a virtual big red pen and striking through all WUWT comments which talk about X W/m^2 as if such an addition had any meaning whatsoever.
On reflection I may need a big virtual boxful or virtual red pens.

… and don’t forget to apply your red pen to discussions that deduce a greenhouse effect from comparing global-average-near-surface-air/ocean temperature to emission temperature of the whole planet as measured from space.
OR make sure that those who present such discussions invoke the axiom: Subtracting three green pears from five red apples will leave two red apples remaining, where the magnitude of that quantity is known as the “green pear effect”.

Having read the draft, it is highly politicised. Cherry picks date ranges to skip out the 30s temperatures. Conveniently forgets to tell people the number of tornadoes is decreasing and instead tries to claim a daily increase is a sign.
For me its not so much what it says, but its what people have gone to a lot of trouble not to mention. When people try to pull the wool over peoples eyes on something obvious, what are they doing on something complex.

Those are the kinds of points that can be made as a start. The report is “incomplete” and “incorrect in some respects”. As such it fails to provide “an adequate framework” for decision making. this can and should be the prelude to the formation of a more discriminating team to evaluate the science. That in itself will marginalize the activist/fraudsters. It is of absolute importance that the selected members of the team to evaluate the science should be highly respected and above reproach. Their mandate should be to call a spade a spade in terms of the science and not hold their punches as the stakes are far too high.
This can set the cat amongst the pigeons, as they say!

Here is what we know.
We know the skeptics and guys like Rud are taking
Their best shots against the report.
We know Pruitt and Trump are in charge.
The final report will tell you conclusively if skeptics have a single valid point.

Well, the foundation of it all is the assumption that we actually know what the global temperature was in the past.
Dr. Ball had a post where “they” admitted past numbers, at the time, were inadequate to determine a Global anything.
Yet they continued to build on the sand.
Here’s how record highs and lows for about 50 square miles (Columbus Ohio) of the Earth’s 170 million square miles of the have been … adjusted.

Forrest, While I got to the list via my local NWS site, they came from NOAA.
BTW I have the list from a few other years. One of them I found on TheWayBackMachine. It is from 2002.
I compared it to the the 2007 list and there were no differences. 5 years between 2002 and 2007 and no new records, real or adjusted.
5 years between 2007 and 2012 and lots of changes made right down to my little spot on the globe.
(I only included records after 2007 if the 2012 list conflicted with the 2007 list.)
What was happening during those years?

Here’s what we know. There are people here discussing the report, potential implications, what NY Times stated etc. They’re discussing based on available facts. You as usual show up,
throw your usual factless shit and go away without flushing.

Mosher, it’s honorable to be an honest proponent of a theory that might be wrong, eg mainstream climate science. It is totally anathema to be against skepticism. Proponents have a much higher standard to meet and the level of thoughtful skepticism is greater or lesser given how well this standard is being met. I hope you don’t believe that three percent of scientists are kicking a55 against 97%. We can take empty ideological zealots out of both sides of the question (clearly you guys are winning hands down in this parallel ‘debate’), and what we have left is proponents desperately fighting a rearguard action with little information content against an apparently better armed but ragtag skeptical squad (otherwise why have proponents been so afraid [that is before the political climate change]).

Some simple questions for the report authors and reviewers:
1. How much has the global temperature risen over the past 50 and 100 years?
2. How much of that increase can be conclusively attributed to man-made CO2 emissions?
3. What evidence is there that that increase has been catastrophic versus favorable (e.g. crop production)?
4. With the Paris accord in place, what is your prediction of the global temperature increase over the next 30 years attributable to humans?
5. What is your prediction of the advantages/disadvantages of that predicted increase?
6. What is your best estimate of the costs/benefits of trying to ameliorate any global temperature increase?

How much has the global temperature risen over the past 50 and 100 years?

All good points, but one immediately runs into a problem that there are few stations with 50 years of uninterrupted data, still less 100 years.The time series land based thermometer data set is meaningless since the sample which it is purporting to depict constantly changes. The sample set in 1900 is not the SAME sample used in 1920 which is not the SAME sample used in 1940 which is not the SAME sample used in 1960 which is not the SAME sample used in 1980 which is not the SAME sample used in 2000 which is not the SAME sample used in 2016.
With a constantly changing sample set it cannot tell us whether and if so by how much temperatures have changed these past 100 or so years.All stations needed to be audited. The 150 (or so) most prime stations in the Northern Hemisphere (those where there are no station moves, no nearby change in land use, best practices of maintenance, practices of record keeping and observation etc) and which are reasonably spatially distributed should then be retro fitted with the same type of LIG thermometer calibrated in Fahrenheit or Centigrade in accordance with the 1930 historic practice of each station selected, and then observations should be made using the same practices (eg., the same TOB) as used at each station. There would be no attempt to make a hemispherical data set, merely compare RAW unadjusted historic data for the period 130 to 1945 with RAW unadjusted recent observation on an individual station by station basis, and note the number of stations that show warming and the amount of such warming.
This will quickly tell us whether there has been any significant rise in temperatures during the period covering some 95% of all manmade emissions.

Retro-fitting stations presumably means having some remote reading /data capture solution, which means providing power and electronics, which generate heat, so these would have to be housed externally & some distance away to ensure no corruption of the temperature measurement.

From analyzing the paleoclimate record and modeling results, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. A good absorber is also a good radiator so any radiant energy that CO2 absorbs, CO2 also radiates away. In the troposphere, CO2 is in almost constant contact with other molecules so energy is sharded. CO2 can gain energy from surrounding molecules and then radiate that energy to space. It is the non-greenhouse gas molecules that are more apt to trap heat because they are such poor radiators to space. If CO2 really affected climate then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposhere but such has not happened.
On researcher has found that the original radiant calculations of the climate sensivity of CO2 are too great by more than a factor of 20 because the original calculations do not take into consideration that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight but very significant decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect. So instead of a climate sensivity of 1.2 degrees C, not including feedbacks, we have a climate sensivity of less than .06 degrees C which is a rather trivial amount.
Then there is the issue of H2O feedback. The idea is that CO2 warming causes more CO2 to enter the atmosphere which causes even more warming because H2O is the primary greenhouse gas. Positive H2O feedback causes an amplification of the warming effect of CO2. The AGW conjecture completely ignores the fact that besides being a greenhouse gas, H2O is a major coolant in the Earth’s Atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface which is mostly some form of H2O, to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. According to energy balance models, more heat energy is moved by H2O via the heat of vaporization then by both LWIR absorption band radiation and conduction and convection combined. As evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less then the dry lapse rate, H2O is a net coolant and hence a negative feedback retarding any warming that more CO2 might provide.
Another major problem with the AGW conjecture is that the radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system including the Earth…The warming effect of our atmosphere is provided for by a convective greenhouse effect and has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of trace gases including CO2, Since the radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction, the AGW conjecture is nothing but science fiction.

When I read a report earlier this year by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation announcing that 2016 was the hottest year on record ( since 1850 in any event) the report said that 2016 was 4 one-hundredths of a degree Celsius warmer than the previous hottest year (2015) according to NOAA and 1 one hundredths of a degree Celsius hotter according to The Met UK.
At about the same time the GWPF were mentioning that but pointing out that the margin of error was one tenth of a degree Celsius.
This is my recall from memory and I will dig out the report.
What does NOAA state in this report as the difference between 2016, 2015 and 2014?
Is any margin of error identified?

With the huge gaps in land station coverage, 70% of the surface being oceans, and the poor land station quality, measuring a global average temp at all is simply not possible. So to claim a new record by 4/100ths is disingenuous at best, even outright fraud.

Apparently many scientists have lost their way regarding average global climate.
It is pretty well accepted that greenhouse gases (ghg) absorb infrared (IR) radiant energy being emitted from the liquid and solid surfaces of the planet. It should be apparent that there must be some elapsed time between when a molecule absorbs a photon and when it emits one because if the elapsed time was zero, there would be no way to tell that the photon had been absorbed. This elapsed time is called the relaxation time for the molecule. Relaxation time for CO2 molecules has been measured and is about 6 microseconds.
Conduction of heat in a gas, sometimes called thermal diffusion, results as molecules bump into each other. This jostling of molecules is observed as temperature and pressure and is accurately described by the well-known Kinetic Theory of Gases. Calculation of the time between collisions has determined that contact between atmospheric molecules at sea level conditions occurs, on average, at about 0.0002 microseconds. Thus it is about 6/0.0002 = 30,000 times more likely that the energy and momentum in a photon will be converted into heat energy and shared with the molecules which surround the molecule that absorbed the photon. The process of photon absorption producing temperature increase is called thermalization. Water vapor (WV) is a ghg. A common observation of thermalization is that humid nights cool slower than desert nights. Thermalized energy carries no identity of the molecule which absorbed it.
Emission of IR from the planet surface is in accordance with the Stephan-Boltzmann (T⁴) law. Emission of radiation from gas molecules is quite different and depends on the energy level of individual molecules. The energy level of individual molecules is determined probabilistically and complies with the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecule energy which favors lower energy molecules.
Emission of photons by molecules occurs only at discreet wavelengths which are characteristic for each molecule species. Every discreet emission wavelength is accompanied by the capability to absorb at the same exact wavelength. At sea level conditions, the discreet absorb/emit wavelengths are slightly broadened into bands. WV has 170+ emission bands at lower energy than the one emission band for CO2 and there are about 35 times as many WV molecules as CO2 molecules. As a consequence, energy absorbed by CO2 is effectively thermalized and rerouted to WV with the end result that CO2 has no significant effect on climate.
The only thing countering the temperature decline that would otherwise be occurring is the increasing trend in water vapor. (WV is a ghg. ‘Otherwise’ results from the net effect of ocean surface temperature cycles which have been in decline since about 2005 and declining solar activity (a proxy for earth warming/cooling) which has been declining since 2014 and dropped below ‘breakeven’ in early 2016.) Average global atmospheric water vapor has been measured and reported by NASA/RSS since 1988 and shows an uptrend of 1.5% per decade. WV has increased about 8% since the more rapid increase began in about 1960.
Links to source data and graphs showing this are at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com

Enjoy Pruitt while you can. The next Democrat EPA administration will undo any progress Pruitt makes so fast it will make your head spin, and redouble the effort to destroy modern society, to make up for lost time.

The federal agencies wouldn’t know what a global temperature was even if it came up and slapped them in the face with a wet fish. There are HUGE areas without measurement coverage, and in the US land station network, less than 10% of stations can read with an accuracy of 1/2 degree or better. The concept of a global average temp is just ridiculous, so to say it’s risen (or fallen) by 0.1deg or so is impossible. Those who do are lying.

globally you only need a few hundred stations.
The reason is this.
90+% of the variance in temperature is explained by latitude and altitude.
Tell me the latitude, tell me the altitude and I can tell you the monthly average.
You can test this.
Simple prediction.

A few hundred? That would be about, what, 1 station to cover about 50,000 square miles!
Yea, right.
You’re computer program may spit out a number with such limited input but your computer screen is not reality.
PS How many of them will be sited at airports?

One of the few ideas of yours Moshe that I agree with. When I look at raw data for the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, South Africa, Paraguay… and see they all give 1930s-40s the hottest period in a thousand years, these are unquestioningly corroborative. A hundred modern, reasonably well located stations (left unadjusted) would serve as an adequate early warning system. Like sea level, if we are worried about several meters of rise, why do we rush down to the sea with micrometers? We could use a yardstick. Or if the more hysterical rates are believed, we could even measure it in ax handles.

After reviewing the previous National Climate Assessment I wrote to the editors to report the existence of errors that disqualified this work from publication. The editors ignored my remarks in favor of a version of reality that supported the Democratic Party line,logically flawed though this line was.

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